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Gary Tarn

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Gary Tarn
File:GARYTARNBIO.jpg
Director Gary Tarn
Occupation(s)Director and composer
Years active1985 – Present
Websitewww.garytarn.com

Biography

Gary Tarn (born 1962) is a British filmmaker and composer. He received success as a member of Drum Theatre (musical group), topping the UK charts in 1985 with "Eldorado”.

For several years he created soundtracks for commercials, and occasionally short films, including the Brothers Quay’s short The Phantom Museum. This work led to the decision to make a film himself. It was initially intended to be a short but developed into Black Sun (2005 film), his debut film. He shot, edited, scored, produced and directed the film, “just to see if it could be done” and it was executive produced by Alfonso Cuaron and Frida Torresblanco and produced by John Battsek.

File:The prophet- gary tarn.jpg
Poster for The Prophet

It was shot in the USA, Iceland and India on 16mm film [1] and is based on interviews with Hugues de Montalembert, an artist and filmmaker who was permanently blinded in 1978 when, during a violent scuffle, a mugger threw paint thinner in his face. De Montalembert' “narrates his own journey into blindness”. Tarn broke down de Montalembert's spoken account of his experience, fragmenting sentences into separate phrases and building "chapters" for the story. He then concocted a different visual approach for each chapter. He altered his 16-mm footage in various ways, creating some of the effects in the camera or altering the lens during shooting.[2] Throughout the film, de Montalembert's face is never seen on screen.[3]

Released in 2005, the film won a number of International Awards and was nominated for The Carl Foreman Award for Special Achievement by a British Director in their First Feature Film at the 2007 BAFTA awards 60th British Academy Film Awards.[1] It was screened on HBO in 2007 [2] and was number 12 in Tim Robey's top 100 films of the decade.[4]

In 2006, while Black Sun was screened at a festival in Serbia, Tarn began to shoot his next feature, an adaptation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (book).[5]

The Prophet switches between digital and 16mm film [6] and is a series of brief sequences mirroring the book’s structure.[5] It was shot in Belgrade, New Bedford, London,[1] New York, Milan and Lebanon. Kahlil Gibran had a benefactor for much of his adult life, Mary Haskell, and Tarn used her letters to Gibran to create a narration for the film, voiced by Thandie Newton.[1]

The Prophet opened at Copenhagen International Documentary Festival in 2011. Tarn considers it to be a documentary, though the spoken narrative is completely fictional, “taken as it is from a poetic novel”, in so far as John’s Grierson defines documentary filmmaking as the “creative treatment of actuality”.[1] It was part of the official selection for Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, DOXA Documentary Film Festival and Magnificent 7 festival.[7] However, due to copyright issues, The Prophet cannot be exhibited in the US until 2016-17.[3]

In 2007 Tarn was cinematographer for Alfonso Cuaron’s The Possibility of Hope.

Tarn currently has a project with Alain de Botton in development and is working on a children’s film.[1]

Awards

Commissions

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Gianmarco Del Re (2003-08-03). "Launch pad". Fluid Radio. Retrieved 2012-11-01.
  2. ^ a b Peter Bowen (2007). "SEEING IN THE DARK". Filmmaker Magazine. Retrieved 2012-11-29.
  3. ^ a b Theresa Everline (2007-02-28). "Capturing a Blind Man's Vision". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 2014-11-06.
  4. ^ Philip French (2006-03-07). "Black Sun". The Guardian. Retrieved 2014-09-30.
  5. ^ a b Pamela Cohn (2012-01-24). "Gary Tarn". Bomb Magazine. Retrieved 2014-10-01.
  6. ^ David Jenkins (2012-09-28). "The Prophet Review". Little White Lies Magazine. Retrieved 2014-10-01.
  7. ^ Gary Tarn. "Bio- Gary Tarn". GaryTarn.com. Retrieved 2014-10-01.

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